The right to vote is the right upon which all of our rights are leveraged - and without which none can be protected.

In order to bring down the incarceration rate, you've got to start with the beginning of life. You've got to make sure that parents and schools are prepared to prepare young people for success. You've got to deal with the next stage of life. You've got to make sure that people have the opportunity to work at a good job, they have access to good healthcare, and that they have the opportunity to build wealth over time.

I was raised in a family where we were taught that the best thing you could do with your life was to really kind of push the cause of progress and justice and human rights forward.

Racial profiling punishes innocent individuals for the past actions of those who look and sound like them. It misdirects crucial resources and undercuts the trust needed between law enforcement and the communities they serve. It has no place in our national discourse, and no place in our nation's police departments.

In this nation, the greatest of all nations, there are no second-class families. That is our great American conviction.

Let us invest less and less in war and tax cuts for the richest 1 percent, and more and more in jobs and schools for the other 99 percent.

It's a funny thing, in the US we all believe that we have a right to go to school. We have a right to a good education. And we don't. The U.S. Constitution contains no right for a child to go to school, let alone for a child to go to a good school. And yet, we know that if they don't go to a good school, they're less likely to be able to realize all that this country has to offer.